Hire the best
freelance WordPress developers

WordPress Development Overview

Back in 2003, WordPress was developed by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a simple blogging platform. Today, it is a much more comprehensive content management system that can power entire businesses and is now responsible for the infrastructure and design of over 30 percent of the web.

The mission of the open-source WordPress project is to democratize web publishing and make secure and powerful software highly accessible to the masses. With over 50,000 WordPress plugins available to customize sites with unique features and countless design themes, it is well on its way to achieving this goal.

While WordPress is already a popular tech choice for everything from e-commerce sites to community forums, its applications are set to grow even more with recent developments.

To build a WordPress site that brings to life the functions and user experience that will best serve your audience, you’ll want to recruit a skilled WordPress website developer with design sense, knowledge of PHP, front-end development, API integrations, and WordPress frameworks.

How to Hire a WordPress Developer

Maybe you’ll get lucky and start a conversation with the perfect WordPress coder looking for work while out at the pub later this week. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen, as you might imagine. WordPress is an extremely popular CMS, and you’ll have to work to find a developer that’ll deliver the results you’re looking for.

Here’s our step-by-step guide on how to hire a WordPress developer:

1. Determine What You Need a WordPress Developer to Do

What do you need a WordPress developer to do? What kinds of skills sets does your WordPress web developer need to possess?

Are you looking for someone to maintain your WordPress infrastructure who’ll be on call to troubleshoot issues and perform database maintenance and backups?

Do you need a WordPress programmer who can build a custom plugin that connects with an external API and requires a mix of JavaScript, PHP, and SQL expertise?

Perhaps you need to build e-commerce capabilities with a WooCommerce store and distinct online shopping functionalities.

Or maybe you want a UI/UX WordPress designer who can design a custom WP theme, elegant landing pages that match your brand, and otherwise maintain the visual elements of your website?

There’s a lot to consider when hiring a WordPress developer or designer, but you’ve probably already begun this step.

Whether you are thinking about hiring a full-time developer skilled with WordPress or a freelance WP coder, you’ll need to think about the specific programming languages and frameworks you need them to be knowledgeable with, as well as related tools and programs. These include:

• Front-end technologies like CSS preprocessors (SCSS, Sass, Less), CSS3, JavaScript, HTML5, and jQuery
• Back-end technologies such as PHP, Laravel, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MySQL
• Code versioning tools including Bootstrap, Git, Mercurial, and SVN
• Working with debugging tools such as Chrome Inspector, XDebug, and Firebug
• Package managers such as Composer, Yarn, and NPM
• Version control systems like Git and Bitbucket
• Design tools like Figma, Sketch, Invision, Photoshop, and Adobe Creative Suite
• Reporting SDKs such as Omniture, Nielsen, comScore, New Relic, and Conviva
• Integrations with popular WP plugins like Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF Pro)
• Knowledge of other technologies like JSON, REST APIs, Node.js, Python, AWS, Gatsby, Typescript, GraphQL, MongoDB, Tailwind CSS, Memcached, Redis, etc.

For project-based hires, scope out the details before continuing, at least on a basic level. Projects that aren’t clearly defined are easily misunderstood, underestimated, finished wrong, or not finished at all. That’s a waste of time and money, so try to do it right from the start!

2. Decide Between Freelance Developers vs. In-House Employees

How do you want to work with your future WordPress developer?

Hiring WordPress developers as full-time employees has been the standard, and there are many benefits to choosing this method. The costs are foreseeable, it’s easier to supervise them directly, and you can build loyalty to your business, product, and brand, among other things. And they’ll be much more responsive, on average.

In-house WordPress developers also benefit by having job security, a chance to grow professionally, and perks and benefits outside of the standard salary.

But there are advantages to freelancers over traditional hiring, as well. Software development is well ahead of other industries in how remote-friendly it is. When hiring freelance WordPress programmers, you can access a global talent pool, save money on taxes and payroll, and enjoy faster hiring times (usually).

3. Write a Compelling Job Description

To attract the right WordPress developer to build the functionality your site needs, you’ll need to draft a compelling, specific job description that convinces prospects your opportunity is worth their time and skills. Every WordPress developer job description should contain some requisite information that candidates need to know before considering the position.

Be sure to include these five sections in your job description and job postings:

• Job title, location, type of employment (full-time, part-time, etc.), salary range
• Company overview, vision, mission statement, and culture
• A detailed list of day-to-day responsibilities
• Required skills
• Benefits and perks

Customize these sections to fit your company’s culture, values, and talent needs. When drafting a job description for a WordPress developer opening, you should mention the specific use case you are building for and the technical experience you expect.

For example, if you are looking for unique themes or custom-built plugins, you should note that you need a developer experienced in PHP and MySQL so they can build their own. Likewise, if you need various API integrations, you should list these requirements in your JD.

Learn more about crafting great JDs in our guide on how to write a web developer job description.

4. Verify Candidates for WordPress Skills and Experience

You’ve found a few WordPress developers who seem to look good on paper. But, how do you tell if your WordPress dev candidates have the expertise, skills, and background you’re looking for?

To give you an example of how you might verify the WordPress credentials of your prospective hire, we’ll give you a peek into how we do it at Arc.

Arc developers go through a rigorous and transparent vetting process before they are featured to hiring managers. We want employers to feel confident they are saving time by meeting candidates who are already qualified.

Arc vets developers in two ways before matching them with companies:

• Communication skills verification – Our talent partners first screen candidates' profiles for relevant training and experience. If it checks out, we assess English language proficiency and communication skills.
• Technical vetting process – Next, developers will then have a technical assessment to test their skills and knowledge in programming languages, algorithms, domain specialization, and frameworks. We also test their ability to translate these programming skills into business value.

To vet candidates yourself, you can use TestGorilla, iMocha, or VerifyWP, among others like LeetCode, Hackerrank, and Codility.

Finally — don’t forget about soft skills!

Particularly when hiring remote WordPress developers, whether they’re employees or freelancers, soft skills can make or break your experience. Great communication skills are vital, particularly effective communication across cultures, their ability to collaborate remotely, and interpersonal skills.

To really hire a WordPress developer you won’t feel the need to micromanage, make sure they’ll work well autonomously. As much as you can, verify their analytical skills, ability to solve problems, and time management.

Remote developers should be productive, so ask them how they effectively manage WFH distractions and how they stay motivated.

5. Check Past Work & References

Before establishing a formal relationship with a WordPress developer, don’t forget to review their portfolio of completed work and consider a paid trial period.

Depending on their preferences, they may have their own website or a developer portfolio hosted on GitHub or another similar site. Dig into it. Do they have some impressive achievements in the WordPress space? Does their website make you feel more confident of their WordPress skills or less so? Are there any testimonials or well-known brands they’ve worked with?

Similarly, don’t hesitate to view the candidate’s LinkedIn profile. Check their work experience section to understand if they work with WordPress regularly and for how long they’ve done so. Do they display their love for WordPress development prominently in their headline or About section? Are there any publications, honors, and awards, or organizations listed that bolster their proof of WordPress skills?

If you want to be thorough, ask for references, as well. There may already be some on their LinkedIn profiles under the Recommendations section. Still, you can ask them for a few names, phone numbers, and email addresses to ask questions that may better relate to your WordPress hiring needs.

6. Interview Your Prospective WordPress Developer

Once your job posting has attracted some promising candidates, you’ll need to put their knowledge to the test in an interview process designed specifically for WordPress development. In addition to looking out for signs of strong communication, passion for development, and genuine interest in your company’s product and mission, your interview should test candidates’ technical knowledge of WordPress development.

Here are 10 WordPress developer interview questions to help you get started:

• What is the current version of WordPress?
• What are your favorite online resources for WordPress themes and plugins? Tutorials and blogs?
• List some of the latest WordPress features.
• What is the activity widget in the WordPress dashboard?
• What is the use of the search engine visibility field in WordPress reading settings?
• What are hooks? Define the different types of hooks in WordPress.
• What is the difference between characters 23 and x23?
• How does WordPress use MySQL?
• Are objects passed by value or reference in WordPress?
• When is WordPress not suitable for a website?

Also —

Since WordPress and many compatible plugins are built using PHP, you may want a developer skilled in PHP development. If so, the technical portion should include PHP interview questions.

**Here are a few questions to help you gauge your developer’s level of familiarity with PHP:

• What’s the difference between the include() and require() functions?
• How can you get the IP address of the client?
• What’s the difference between unset() and unlink?
• What are the main error types in PHP and how do they differ?
• What are traits?

For more ideas, you can also check out our guides for general software engineering interview questions and senior software engineering interview questions to ask. To go even further, you can test whether they’ll work well autonomously or not with our freelance interview questions and our remote-readiness interview questions.

7. Understand What You Can Afford to Pay

The good news is, of all the tech stacks out there, WordPress development is rather affordable while still providing a great range of flexibility and functionality. Affordability aside, beware of opting for the lowest bidder, which indicates a lack of confidence or perceived value of one’s own work.

To help you gauge what skilled and confident WordPress developers should cost, we’ll quickly go over salary averages and WordPress developer freelance rates.

Remote WordPress developers make a global average of $60,648 USD per year, based on self-reported data from our salary database:

• For junior WordPress developers, the average salary is $53,804.
• For senior WordPress developers, the average salary is $70,792.

For freelance WordPress developers, the average hourly rate is $61-80, based on data compiled on more than 20,000 vetted developers in our network. Keep in mind that this survey included participants of varying experience levels from all around the globe. WordPress developers in Asia, northern Africa, and Eastern Europe may charge lower than $50 per hour, while skilled developers in North America may charge upwards of $100.

Comparing the cost of full-time salaried WordPress developers against the cost of freelance developers working full-time hours, the former may seem like a bargain. However, keep in mind that unpaid benefits and indirect costs significantly increase the overall expenditure of full-time on-site employees.

For more information, check out our guide on cost differences between freelance and in-house hiring.

Where to Find WordPress Developers

1. Here On Arc

To find great WordPress developers, you need not look any further — Hire great devs right here on Arc!

We have thousands of pre-vetted candidates skilled in WordPress to help you build custom themes, create proprietary plugins, maintain the WordPress infrastructure, and more. Looking to hire the best remote developers? Explore HireAI, your personal AI recruiter, and see how you can:

• ⚡️ Get instant candidate matches without searching
• ⚡️ Identify top applicants from our network of 350,000+ devs with no manual screening
• ⚡️ Hire 4x faster with vetted candidates (qualified and interview-ready)

2. Hiring Platforms

We’re biased, of course, and we do believe Arc is the best place to find WordPress engineers and programmers. However, there are a lot of other great hiring platforms and job boards out there, as well.

Andela, Turing, and Toptal are three of the most well-established platforms specifically for tech talent. There’s also Terminal, Triplebyte, and a host of others.

Like Arc, most of these platforms pre-verify their developers to ensure at least a basic level of technical expertise, communication skills, and related abilities. Also check out the official WordPress jobs site, where you can post an ad to find WP developers, translators, plugin builders, and others.

3. Freelance Marketplaces

Arc also can help you locate freelance WordPress programmers. But, if you want to check some of your other options out, we won’t hold it against you!

For niche marketplaces specifically catering to freelance developers and other tech-adjacent talent, check out Gigster or Toptal, or check out our list of Toptal alternatives, including BairesDev and Guru. For general freelancer marketplaces where you can find contract workers in tech and in a variety of other fields, there’s Fiverr, Upwork, and others.

While the niche marketplaces specializing in freelance developers often vet the candidates for technical knowledge, be careful on general freelance marketplaces. There, it’s often a race to the bottom on pricing, and anyone can sign up and offer WordPress programming and other software development services. While you might certainly find a great programmer or two there, it’s likely that it’ll be more the exception rather than the rule.

Check out these freelance marketplaces to find great WordPress developers and designers:

• Freelancer
• Codeable
• Envato Studio
• Guru
• Upwork
• PeoplePerHour

You can learn more about sourcing developers through online marketplaces vs recruitment agencies.

4. LinkedIn

If you feel like putting in the work yourself, LinkedIn is an awesome place to find developers with WordPress experience looking for work.

Not only can you look for programmers skilled in WordPress, but you can immediately view their entire software engineering resume. Furthermore, you can utilize your own network of professional connections by reaching out to see if anyone has any leads on WordPress programmers. Simultaneous with active searching, you can do a passive search by placing a job ad on LinkedIn, as well.

The main downside of using LinkedIn to source developers is that everyone uses it. There, you’re competing against top companies, technical sourcers, and recruitment agencies, all trying to get the best WordPress developers.

5. Recruiters

Recruitment agencies and solo tech recruiters are a great option when looking for local tech talent or for developers who’ll work remotely. Recruiters take care of vetting, matching, and also interviewing, but this comes at a higher price, as you can imagine.

However, that high price frees you and/or your in-house hiring staff from the time and effort it takes to go through numerous employment processes. On top of that, recruiters and recruitment agencies often have domain knowledge, in this case WordPress development, as well as leads in their system to current WordPress developers looking for work.

These five options are some of the most popular ways to source developers working with WordPress, but they’re by no means all of them. For a full list of ways to hire developers, see this post.

How to Work With a WordPress Programmer Successfully

Once you’ve signed the contract, you might be rarin’ to get them working. But, as you do, keep the below advice in mind to ensure you create an environment that allows them to thrive, learn, grow, and be happy.

1. Spend Time Onboarding Your Developer Properly

Whether you’re hiring a full-time, in-house, in-office employee or a freelance WordPress coder to just clock in a few hours on the weekends, it pays off to onboard your developers right. Software engineers and developers are usually quite analytical and often appreciate knowing the “why” behind your decisions and asks. Even if your company produces a well-known product or service, help your new WordPress developer understand the point of their new role. What are they ultimately trying to accomplish? How does hiring a WordPress developer help get them there?

Spending a day or two onboarding software engineers and teaching them about the company sounds expensive. However, it certainly saves money in the long run, as they’ll be more invested in their work, able to make better decisions going forward, and simply feel like an important part of the team.

2. Settle the Legalities & Privacy Issues at the Very Beginning

If you’re employing a WordPress developer, your company’s HR team likely has everything under control. But, when you hire a freelancer or contract worker, you may have to wade into the legalese yourself.

Every freelance WordPress development project needs a solid contract to protect both parties. You can learn how to write one with our freelance developer contract templates.

A non-disclosure agreement is essential to protect your confidential information, but it also serves to protect theirs. Oh, and if you’re working with a WordPress freelance developer, be sure you understand how to do taxes right.

3. Come to Them With a Full-Fledged Plan

Define a clear scope and requirements for your WordPress project, especially if you will be working with a freelance developer. This will help synchronize expectations and ensure everything moves forward on schedule.

Learn how to write a PRD (product requirements document) they’ll understand. Just because it makes sense to you, it may not make sense to your newly hired WordPress developer, so keep that in mind. Also, learn how to create an optimal development workflow to reach maximum productivity and efficiency.

4. Be a Great Leader

There are countless resources out there on how to be a great leader. Here are a few of our own top picks:

• How to Encourage Self-Discipline in Remote Developers
• Write Up a Manager README to Help Devs Work More Effectively With You
• Recognize Their Contributions and Accomplishments
• Be Strategic With How You Hold Engineering Team Meetings
• Measure Their Performance With Objectivity
• Know How to Scrum With Your Developers Efficiently
• Understand the Various Personalities That Make Up Your Dev Team
• Fix Your Engineering Management Style If It’s Not Working
• Be An Engineering Manager the Entire Team Respects
• Create a Supportive & Positive Work Environment
• Treat Freelance Developers Like In-House Employees

5. Always Pay On Time

Choose among fixed cost, hourly, and retainer freelance payment methods and select the best one for your project. Pay on time, all the time — one late payment can significantly erode the trust your developer has in you and your project, especially at the beginning.

If you’re looking for a payroll solution, check out our guide comparing ADP vs Paychex vs Gusto.

6. Invest In Their Development

Software engineers given employee development opportunities stay at their jobs longer, are more productive, and attract more clients, among other things. Whether they’re fully paid with stock options and pet insurance or an hourly freelance WordPress developer, investing in their professional growth often has a high ROI. And, it keeps them happy so they stick around!

7. Let Them Go Gently If You Must

Maybe you have a full-fledged developer horror story on your hands, or perhaps they’re simply just not working out. Sometimes your great developer is just okay, and sometimes a great developer doesn’t turn out to work well as a freelancer.

Whatever the case may be, ensure you are respectful and polite if deciding to let them go.

A failed development project is not ideal, but remember your WordPress developer is a human being, not an easily replaceable product or lines of code. Your employee or freelancer still depends on their WordPress programming to pay their bills, so do your best to ensure a smooth, low-stress exit for them.

Great WordPress Development Resources

Before we wrap up our guide on how to hire WordPress developers, we thought we’d leave you with some helpful resources.

1. Events

WordPress-related events are an ideal way to connect in-person, join debates, and get referrals for potential partners to work with in the future. This section presents a list of WordPress Camps and Meetups. Don’t forget, even in an internet-focused industry, face-to-face connections can still carry a lot of weight in establishing long-term partnerships.

WordCamps are casual, locally organized events put together by WordPress community members to discuss and share on all topics WordPress. There are hundreds of events all over the world every year — check the schedule to find one nearby.

WordPress Meetups represent another opportunity to meet, greet, and learn about general and specific WordPress development topics. The WordPress Meetup community consists of over 740,000 members and more than 1,200 groups around the world. You are sure to be able to find one in your locality to attend.

2. Blogs and Tutorials

Blogs and tutorials are a great resource for learning about the latest plugins, WordPress applications, and news — such as progress on the Gutenberg editor — not to mention a means of identifying knowledge authorities in the field.

Hongkiat – This is a site dedicated to development and design, and a section of their blog has a wealth of WordPress-related material. The WordPress pages have articles on everything from top WordPress themes and plugins to ways to boost your site speed.

Smashing Magazine – Smashing Magazine offers its own content as well as curations of content for web developers and designers. The site has a WordPress community for beginners as well as a blog for more advanced WordPress developers who want to optimize their sites.

[Make a Website] – The WordPress tutorials and reviews section of this site provide a depth of regularly published material on making a WordPress blog, product reviews, plugin updates, domains and web hosting, and more.

Awesome WordPress GitHub – This is a curated list of WordPress plugins, themes and frameworks, tools, books, and resources for everything you could possibly want to know about WordPress development.

WPHUB – This site offers WordPress themes, hosting, an up-to-date informative blog, and a WP 101 section for those who are just starting their WordPress journey. WPHUB also offers a library of step-by-step resources to help site owners and developers successfully implement new functions.

3. Popular WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins help developers extend the functionality of WordPress for almost any use case, including photo blogging, professional portfolios, online communities, social networking, and even government sites. Developers can also modify plugins or create their own to make completely new applications.

Here is a list of eight of the most popular WordPress Plugins that may be useful for your project.

Yoast SEO – Yoast SEO is touted as the number one WordPress plugin. As the name suggests, it helps you analyze your WordPress site for Search Engine Optimization. Its features include optimization for meta descriptions, ALT text, external and internal linking, titles, text, and more.

W3 Total Cache – This is a plugin that increases website speed by caching data as static HTML so that it can load faster the next time users access the same page. Improving speed and performance is a vital factor in improving search engine rankings, and this plugin is a great tool to help out in that regard.

Akismet – Akismet, developed by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, now comes with every WordPress core installation. This plugin serves as a spam filter and allows site moderators to view approved comments for each user, their comment history, and remove suspicious URLs.

MonsterInsights – MonsterInsights connects your page to Google Analytics and allows you to monitor how users interact with your site. With a better understanding of performance levers like unique views, returning users, and conversion rates, you can make adjustments to boost traffic and revenue.

Woocommerce – This is a flexible plugin for creating eCommerce stores — it currently powers 30 percent of online shops. The Woocommerce plugin is compatible with the majority of WordPress themes and helps developers and site owners set up functionality for selling physical goods, digital goods, subscriptions, shipping, and more.

Smush Image Compression – Images take up a lot of space and reduce site speed. The Smush plugin compresses all JPEG, GIF, and PNG files so they take up less space, and also has a bulk compress function to compress up to 50 attachments at one time. This helps your site retain its appeal and its performance.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin automatically creates an XML sitemap for your WordPress site, helping search engines better index your page. Every time you publish something new on your site, search engines will be notified, and bots can retrieve results more efficiently, which will improve your site’s SERP. (Yoast includes this feature already, though.)

**WordFence – WordFence is an all-inclusive security plugin with features such as: a web application firewall, malware scanner, login protection, live traffic monitoring, and more. The tools provided by WordFence help you better assess threats and prevent attacks from hackers and malicious bots.

4. Official WordPress Development Resources

• WordPress Reference – Codebase documentation
• Coding Standards – Ensure your developer maintains WP standards
• Block Editor – On the Gutenberg blog editor and full-site editing (FSE)
• WordPress Themes – On developing and designing WP themes
• WordPress Plugins – On developing WP plugins
• [WordPress APIs – Interact with the most common and popular in the WordPress.org ecosystem
• WordPress CLI – The WordPress command line interface (WP-CLI) commands and functions
• WordPress REST API – The WP REST API lets developers build and connect with external applications that can interact with WordPress content

Wrapping Up Our Guide On Hiring WordPress Developers

To review, take the following steps to successfully partner with the skilled WordPress developer you need to build or optimize your site.

Consider whether your WordPress development needs would be best met by hiring a full-time WordPress developer or partnering with a freelance developer, and allocate your budget accordingly.

Join online communities to learn and network. Keep up-to-date on WordPress news and developments through blogs and tutorials. Attend WordCamps and Meetups to network in person, and meet talented developers who may be interested in working with you and your team.

Craft a compelling job description that introduces your company, its product, and vision, and details the technological experience you require, as well as the tasks to be performed.

Lastly, design a WordPress developer interview process that not only screens for enthusiastic developers who are strong communicators, but also tests for the specific conceptual and practical tech know-how your WordPress project(s) will require.

Using the resources and tips offered in this article, you should be well prepared to launch your recruitment efforts. Happy hiring!